This story aired on Florida NPR member stations WMFE and WMFV on July 22, 2021.
By a margin of nearly 90 percent, Orange County voters approved a charter amendment last November aimed at protecting the “rights of nature.”
Now, backers are taking the issue statewide by pushing five amendments to the Florida constitution.
WMFE environmental reporter Amy Green talked about the effort with Chuck O’Neal, chairman of the Florida Rights of Nature Network.
The amendments are aimed at protecting wetlands and waterways and preventing hunting of iconic species like the Florida black bear. They also would prohibit captive hunting and toll roads through conservation and rural lands.
“In our society, the way that it was set up originally, there were only a certain few people who were rights bearing and generally when the Constitution was written, that was a white property owning males,” says O’Neal.
“The evolution of the expansion of these rights is now at a point that we can look at nature, not as property, not as something that’s a thing, but something that can have rights, not the rights of a person, but to have certain rights, as we do here in Orange County, our waterways have rights,” he says…
Listen to the story HERE.